Originally posted by: taltamir
It is probably a better idea to do a clean install. actually, why exactly ARE you not doing it? if your only purpose in doing so is avoiding the 100MB partition, know that the 100MB reserved partition is a windows7 thing for bitlocker (useless waste).
You can avoid it by partitioning AND ACTIVATING the drive first before installing.
The reserved partition serves more of a purpose than that....
Windows 7 sizes it so that your system partition after it will have an SSD friendly 128KB alignment.
XP default partitioning (and Acronis TrueImage as well!!) is to start the first partition on sector 63, which isn't even 4KB aligned, so you potentially have a stupid situation like the one below, where to write filesystem cluster 9984 (if you aren't also writing 9983 and 9985), the disk must first read clusters 9999 and 10000 to see what was there before rewriting them since you are only replacing
part of the data.
Edit: for some reason the attach code feature is stripping out my CR. Maybe just regular text will work better?
|---------SSD cluster 9999----------|-----------SSD cluster 10000---------|
filesystem cluster 9983-------|------filesystem cluster 9984---------|-----filesystem cluster 9985